Cortex DC, a subsidiary of The Chatterjee Group, plans to develop 2 GW of AI-ready data centre capacity across India’s Golden Quadrilateral over the next seven years, using existing land parcels in the country’s west, east, north and south.
The company is entering the data centre sector to build digital infrastructure for artificial intelligence, cloud and enterprise workloads. Cortex DC Chief Executive Officer Rahul Sharma said the facilities are being planned to meet rising demand for high-performance computing driven by AI adoption, cloud usage and growing data consumption.
“There is no fixed number of data centres envisaged at this stage. Our plan is to develop 2 GW of AI-ready data centre capacity across India’s Golden Quadrilateral, with the scale and number of facilities determined as the project progresses,” Sharma told The Hindu BusinessLine.
The company has not finalised the locations or the number of facilities. Sharma said sites are being explored and evaluated on the basis of multiple considerations, while the proposed land parcels will be drawn from Cortex DC’s existing holdings across different regions of India.
The proposed data centres are intended to serve both domestic and global customers. The sectors and industries using the facilities will depend on demand and evolving customer requirements, according to the company.
Cortex DC is targeting operational readiness for its first data centre within 18 months of the first shovel being put into the ground. The timeline reflects the company’s stated aim of responding quickly to demand for AI-ready infrastructure and hypercompute capacity.
Power availability and sourcing will be central to the proposed rollout. Sharma said the data centres are planned to use electricity from multiple green-energy sources, with 51 per cent of their energy requirement envisaged to be met through green power.
The announcement places the project within India’s expanding digital-infrastructure build-out, where data centres require large sites, dependable power and connectivity to support cloud services, enterprise computing and AI workloads. However, the company has not yet disclosed specific cities, investment figures, construction partners or a detailed commissioning schedule for the planned capacity.
Cortex DC’s next stated milestones are the selection and evaluation of locations, the start of construction and the targeted commissioning of its first facility within 18 months of construction beginning.
